Note 3 — Chapter XXII · EXPERT OPINION

The bill for medical and surgical attendance on the school football squad (thirty-five men) at Exeter in the season of 1904, reckoned at full rates, was twenty-two dollars. The injuries were mainly muscle bruises and strained ankles. The most troublesome case was a neglected scratch on the foot. The trainer reports for the same season, among the one hundred and twenty-five fellows playing football on the various school and class teams, “practically no injuries at all.” The record for the year 1903 was much the same. In a private school in Boston, where seventy-five to one hundred boys, from ten to eighteen years old, were engaged during the fall of 1904 in playing football, the only accident of the season was a broken nose, suffered by a boy who did not wear a nose guard. At Harvard, after a peculiarly unfortunate season, in which, it is feared, men were sometimes played when not in the pink of condition, those best acquainted with the facts could still report in January, 1905, “We had no injuries that could be called serious.” From New Haven a most trustworthy authority writes: “We have been fortunate here for many years in having no serious accidents. The most incapacitating accidents this season have been muscle bruises, generally called ‘Charley Horse,’ which, while in no sense permanent and, as the surgeons would put it, with a distinctly favorable prognosis, cripple a man’s speed so much as to make it almost impossible to use him if he is a player in the backfield. For this reason Yale’s backs in the Harvard game were different from those who faced Princeton a week before. Yet though these two hard contests came close together, no Yale man left the field in the Harvard game, and no time was taken out on Yale’s account.”

It is safe to say that no harder football is played in the country than at Exeter and Yale; yet the reports from these centres of the game bear little resemblance to the lurid tales of murder and mutilation which newspaper correspondents delight in. The worst injuries from football known to the writer have occurred in games played by workingmen out for a holiday, or by untaught, unfit lads trying what they imagined to be football.